Chapter 59: THE BOAT AT MATINS

The snow had stopped falling by the time Konrad reached the quay, but the river ran black and swollen beneath the ice, groaning like a beast in its sleep. The boatman was there, as promised, a stooped figure in a oiled cloak who did not ask his name. He simply unhooked the lantern from the post and gestured toward the narrow skiff bobbing against the pilings.

“You come alone?” the boatman asked.

Konrad hesitated. The letter burned against his heart. The ring was cold on his finger. Behind him, Prague was waking—chimneys coughing smoke into a grey dawn, the distant bell of St. Vitus calling the canonical hours. Somewhere in that city, Ottokar was stretching in his furs, already calculating his next move. Somewhere, Eliska von Kuenring was wondering why the door to the winter garden had been left unanswered. And somewhere—perhaps in a nursery, perhaps in a grave—a boy with his father’s eyes was waiting.

“I come alone,” Konrad said.

The boatman nodded and steadied the skiff as Konrad stepped aboard. The wood was slick with frost, and the river smell rose around them—cold, mineral, ancient. The boatman pushed off, and the current took them.

They moved in silence through the channel between the houses, past the mills and the fish weirs, past the place where the Vltava bent toward the south. Konrad watched the city recede, its towers and spires growing small against the pale sky. He had come to Prague as a guest. He was leaving as a ghost.

“You know where the house is?” the boatman asked after a long while.

“I have the address.”

“And you know what you will find there?”

Konrad turned to look at him. The boatman’s face was hidden beneath the hood, but his voice was familiar in a way that made Konrad’s spine prickle. It was the voice of a man who had seen too much to be surprised by anything.

“I know what I was told,” Konrad said carefully. “A brother. A boy who carries my father’s eyes.”

The boatman said nothing. The river carried them on.

They passed beneath the bridge where the executioner’s wheel stood empty, its iron spokes crusted with frost. Konrad thought of Tobias and his ledger of bones, of the scarred man who kept count of the dead. His father’s name was in that ledger. One day, perhaps, his own would be too.

“The woman who told you,” the boatman said at last. “The one in grey. Do you trust her?”

Konrad did not answer immediately. He thought of Hedwig von Eppenstein—his father’s sister, the sister Rudolf would not let him claim. She had given him the scroll with the wolf’s head seal. She had given him the ring. She had told him the river remembers.

“I trust what she told me,” Konrad said. “I do not trust why she told me.”

The boatman made a sound that might have been a chuckle. “Wise.”

The skiff scraped against a low stone landing, hidden behind a tangle of willows that hung over the water like a curtain. The boatman shipped his oars and gestured toward a narrow stair cut into the bank, slick with moss and half-frozen.

“The house is above,” he said. “The back door is unlocked. No one will see you.”

Konrad stepped onto the landing and looked up. The stair wound between crumbling walls, and at the top he could see the corner of a timber-framed house, its shutters closed, its chimney cold. It was the kind of house that did not want to be noticed.

He turned back to the boatman. “Will you wait?”

The boatman shook his head. “I was paid to bring you here. Nothing more.”

“Then how do I leave?”

The boatman’s hood shifted, and for a moment Konrad caught the glint of an eye—grey as river ice, old as stone.

“The river carries all its children,” the boatman said. “You will find your way.”

He pushed off before Konrad could respond, and the skiff slid back into the current, vanishing into the mist that hung over the water. Konrad stood alone on the landing, the frost biting through his boots, the letter a weight against his chest.

He climbed.

The back door was unlocked, as promised. It opened onto a narrow kitchen, cold and dark, the hearth long dead. Konrad closed the door behind him and stood still, listening. The house was silent—too silent. No creak of floorboards, no breath of sleep, no stir of a child turning in his bed.

He moved through the kitchen into a corridor. The walls were bare plaster, the floorboards worn smooth by generations of feet. A staircase rose at the end of the corridor, and Konrad took it slowly, one step at a time, his hand on the dagger at his belt.

The upstairs was a single long room, low-ceilinged, lit by a single window that faced the river. A bed stood against one wall, its coverlet neat and undisturbed. A chest sat at its foot. And in the corner, by the window, stood a small wooden chair.

On the chair sat a boy.

He was perhaps six years old, with dark hair and a pale face, and he watched Konrad with eyes that were grey as winter light. His father’s eyes. Konrad’s own eyes.

“You are the man from the boat,” the boy said. His voice was small but steady. “The boatman said you would come.”

Konrad crossed the room slowly, as if approaching a wounded animal. He knelt before the chair, so that his face was level with the boy’s.

“What is your name?” Konrad asked.

“Peter,” the boy said. “Peter von Eppenstein.”

The name struck Konrad like a blow. He had not expected the boy to know the name. He had not expected the boy to claim it.

“Who told you that name?” Konrad asked.

“The woman in grey.” The boy’s eyes did not waver. “She said you would come for me. She said you would take me away from here.”

Konrad reached out and took the boy’s hand. It was cold, small, fragile. He thought of the letter in his tunic, the letter that named him the true heir. He thought of Rudolf, the serpent who had killed his father. He thought of the river, rising.

“Yes,” Konrad said. “I have come for you.”

The boy smiled, and for a moment he looked exactly like the portrait Konrad had never seen of their father—the same curve of the mouth, the same light in the grey eyes.

“The woman said you would know what to do,” Peter said. “She said you would know where to go.”

Konrad looked toward the window. The mist was lifting over the river, and beyond it, to the south, lay the road to Vienna. The road to the Habsburg lands. The road to Rudolf.

“I know where to go,” Konrad said.

And he did. He knew it with a certainty that burned like a coal in his chest. He would take the boy, and he would go to Vienna. He would walk into the serpent’s den with his father’s son at his side—and he would make Rudolf I of Habsburg answer for every death that had bought his crown.

The river was rising, and Konrad was no longer a fang.

He was the serpent’s death.